Digital Innovation Lab
A B2B producer dashboard for a renewable-energy company, turning passive data into active participation.
The need
Vandebron can trade and optimise green energy brilliantly, but its producers felt left in the dark. When the grid was overloaded and their assets were curtailed, they got no explanation, so they disengaged even though the data was right there. The desire was to turn passive access into active participation.
The challenge
The honest problem was not a missing feature, it was behaviour under complexity, and I had to pull the team away from 'just give them more data'. On top of that, NDA delays blocked our direct user interviews, so I had to build the evidence base from multi-stream desk research instead and still keep the design grounded in something real.
What I made
I took the lead on this project. I had the most design-thinking experience while the rest of the team was new to it, so I ran the whole process end to end. I reframed the work to 'behavioural activation', then drove the design of a dashboard around three pillars (awareness, education, engagement) with a Participation Optimisation Score that shows a producer exactly how activated they are and the concrete steps that lift their score and their returns. I wrote a phased rollout grounded in Affordance Theory so we would not overwhelm users by shipping everything at once.
The outcome
We presented the work to an audience from Accenture, ABN AMRO, Coca-Cola and Heineken, and Vandebron signalled strong intent to use the insights in their real dashboard build.
Key points
- Took the lead as the most experienced in design thinking, driving the reframe from data-availability to behavioural activation
- Designed the Participation Optimisation Score as the flagship engagement mechanism
- Authored a phased rollout grounded in Affordance Theory and overload literature
- Prototyped in Lovable, validated with Vandebron, presented to a blue-chip audience